


Five Minutes

by Shadowolf19



Series: Tomorrow There'll Be Sunshine And All This Darkness Past [2]
Category: Actor RPF, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Drama, Introspection, M/M, Missing Scene, Romance, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-07
Updated: 2015-05-07
Packaged: 2018-03-29 12:06:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3895708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadowolf19/pseuds/Shadowolf19
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The first call goes unanswered not on purpose, but merely because his phone is such a remote thing in his mind that he doesn’t even notice when it rings in his jeans pocket. And it’s only by chance that the second one, few minutes after, doesn’t end up the same exact way.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Minutes

**Author's Note:**

> Set after the Avengers: Age Of Ultron London premiere, held on April 21st. 
> 
> Albeit it belongs to a series centered on RDJ and Jude Law, it's pretty much straight forward and can totally be read without any prior knowledge of it, as the series follows the actors' daily life in a chronological order.  
> The title comes from Five Minutes by Scattered Trees, which for its rhythm is good to listen to while reading the story. Enjoy!

The party is already entering its full-swing mode, even if it has started just half an hour ago, but they’re so used to each other’s company that all it takes is a couple of seconds, just the time of being all together in the same room really, and they’re already joking and hugging and laughing around.  
So the first call goes unanswered not on purpose, but merely because his phone is such a remote thing in his mind that he doesn’t even notice when it rings in his jeans pocket. And it’s only by chance that the second one, few minutes after, doesn’t end up the same exact way. Still, those bunch of seconds between getting the phone out and sharpening his eyes on the display to read the caller’s ID are just too few to allow him to press the green button. He sighs softly as the call gets terminated by the other end, but it lasts just a couple of moments, and then it’s passed, and the phone gets slipped back in its place.  
But it’s not its destiny to stay there for long. Soon a small vibration alerts him of a new message. Sighing slightly deeper, annoyed, he takes it back out, opens the message, and when he sees that it’s his voice mail, he delete it straight forward, without even thinking it twice.  
« Problems? »  
Chris’s voice startles him a little, albeit he was the one he was talking to before he heard his own ringtone.  
« … Uh? No… Not at all, just a nuisance that I _reeeally_ don’t want to deal with right now. » he says, phone already out of sight, his smile back to its place.  
« Agree, this hour of the night, if it’s not your lover, then it’s bound to be trouble. »  
« Yup. And since I said goodnight to Susan half an hour ago, and you’re here with me, that leaves out just the last one, so… no way I’m picking that up. »  
He sees him looking briefly aside, that shy little smile of his brightening up his face crosswise, and he can’t keep himself from pinching gently his belly, a gesture born by chance and soon become one of their secret codes.  
« Oh, shut _up_. » Chris mutters as catching his stare, sighing softly before turning his gaze back on him, that little twist on his lips still there, some sort of a silent reminder.  
« What? I’m not saying anything… » he tries defending himself, while his hand stretches and goes pinching the other man’s side once again.  
« I know what you were about to say, so I beat you to it. »  
« Is that so? Playing defensive, aren’t we, _Captain_? »  
« Don’t you start, _Robert_. I’ve got a name, one I happen to like very much. »  
« Yeeeah, but y’know, it creates confusion when we’re all hanging out together, I mean, what they were even th- »  
« Gee you’re repetitive, you know that? » Chris interrupts him, rolling his eyes and shaking his head before looking at him again. « Too much bla-bla-bla, I need another drink. You want anything? »  
Pretending to be cross, he pouts, shaking his head and leaning against the wall, as if he was a lonely teenager at his first prom, without a date. « I’ll annoy the wall, thank you very much. »  
The other man snickers softly as going towards the bar counter, while he sighs quietly, staying there with the shadow of a smile on his lips. Until his pocket vibrates again, anticipating the quick ring of an incoming message. And then another. And another. And so on, to the point that he gets so frustrated that he _has_ to take his phone out, even if he’d much rather not to. What he sees on the screen doesn’t surprise him, not one bit.  
« For fuck’s sake… » he mutters to himself, new texts coming in at a second’s rate.  
He throws a rapid glance towards the counter, estimating a five-ten minutes waiting time, enough to make sure his phone will stay dead silent for the rest of the evening. He sneaks out quickly from the busy and cheerfully lout room, out in the slightly chilly London backstreet, where he zips up his coat, lights up a cigarette with zero tobacco in, and – after another moment or two of internal discussion about the necessity of the next step – finally initiates what he already knows will be a very stressful call.  
Not even a whole ring goes by, that the line has already been open. But nobody says anything for a minute or so. Until he just has enough, sighs loudly and asks point blank:  
« What do you want? »  
No answer.  
« C’mon, you were basically tormenting me, and now you won’t even talk? »  
Still nothing. He waits a bunch of seconds more, and then: « Listen, I’m gonna han-- »  
« Doesn’t it feel weird? »  
When he finally hears his voice, it’s like he just got hit by en electrical spark, and even if he was waiting for it, still it surprises him, while a chill down his back not so gently reminds him that it had been a year since they last spoke. The realization is quite scattering, he’d bet not just for him.  
« … What feels weird? »  
« Being here, in… in London, I mean. Without me. »  
He sighs deeply, as he already knew what the previous question was all about, but it burns nevertheless. He fights an impossible fight with himself, to try and shut everything out, but he’s not quite confident he’s gonna succeed.  
« I was… actively avoiding thinking about it, y’know. Thanks for remind me, though. » his own bitterness surprises him, and scares him a little too, for he thought he had finally come to terms with the whole thing.  
« … Me too. » confesses the voice to the other end of the line, trembling slightly, in a swing that doesn’t promise anything good. « I… I was doing fine, or so I thought, and then… then it all went to shit, I suppose… » he giggles, but there’s no sign of joy in it, just sadness.  
He sighs deeply, and realizes that swallowing is becoming a more and more difficult task within each breath. Another bad sign. Sitting down on the ledge of the sidewalk, his mind gets so full of images that he thinks it’s gonna explode soon in millions of pieces.  
« Y-You… didn’t answer my question. » finally breaking the silence, « What… What do you want? Why the call and the messages? »  
« … Must there be a reason? » replies the other, too quickly, too spontaneous, an answer given so many times before, in completely different circumstances, to become a habit that even now it’s too hard to break or let go. He swallows, before correcting his shot: « … I don’t know. » he confesses, and he can tell that it’s the absolute truth.  
Rubbing his eyes slowly, he wishes everything in the world could disappear, just for a minute. Leave him alone. Give him time to breath, to push it all out again, pretending nothing ever happened. He keeps silent, his mind so blank that it’s impossible to formulate a single thought, to the point where it just gets painful, and all he can think about is a way out.  
« I… I-I’m gonna go now. » almost whispering, while on the other end a breath gets held, achingly.  
« Please don’t. »  
« … I have to. This… is not gonna go anywhere. »  
No reply comes for a long time, not to just before he is about to end the call.  
« Just… Just tell me how can you possibly… go around the city and not see our ghosts everywhere. » his voice is so hard all the sudden, he almost doesn’t recognize it.  
He opens his mouth to answer, but before he can say anything a cascade of words plummets on him.  
« Just tell me this, and I will leave you alone, I promise. Because I… I’ve been trying and trying, so fucking hard, to forget, to… not look back, to… live normally again, but no matter how much work I do, or how busy I keep myself, all it takes is just a tiny thing, a small, insignificant detail and I start seeing us again, everywhere, on the streets, in the parks, in bloody supermarkets! I’ve been so… together with everything these few weeks that I’ve been shooting in Leavesden, and you know why?, because we never fucking went there, not even once! I felt such a normal person again, and I thought, oh, see?, I’m really improving, it just took time, that’s all… But then I come back to town for just two days, two bloody days, to see my kids, and the first thing that I see is your fucking face everywhere! I… I’m going mad, I think I’ll have to move to Iceland or something… »  
« … You love the sun, should choose a more suitable place for you. » he murmurs, more out of habit than consciously.  
The silence that follows is valid just for words, for he can clearly make out the heavy breath followed by barely-audible tears, a sound way too familiar to not be immediately recognizable. When it becomes unbearable to hear, he forces himself to speak, even if his voice is not as stable as he would like it to be.  
« Why the fuck did you end it, then? I… I thought we were okay, I thought… I mean, I know it had been difficult lately, with our jobs and stuff, but… after four years, I thought… I thought we could have overcome anything together, you know… But then you went and… broke things off so abruptly, and all the sudden you were not returning my calls or anything… I even came to your door a couple of times, stayed there three or four hours, but you never opened. Do you have any idea how much I’ve been hurting because of your… neurotic behavior? You left me, and didn’t even give me a possibility to ask why, or try and amend whatever horrible thing I did to you to get you to the point of taking such an absurd decision! You know how shitty does _that_ feel? »  
Short-breathed, he swallows hard to calm down, pushing his own tears back in his eye sockets, forcing himself to stand up again, and work up some much needed courage to end a conversation that he should have never had started in the first place.  
« Listen, I… I really have to go now, you know how parties go, if I miss for too long… » he stops half the way through, biting his lower lip and cursing himself for what he just said. Anyone else wouldn’t have noticed it, but not _him.  
_ « … You found someone else. » he whispers, as if reading straight into his thoughts, and his tone is so hurt and astonished that is just too painful to hear.  
He doesn’t even try and deny it – it would be extremely pointless, for he knows him too well. « Goodbye, Jude. » he simply says in a low and deep sigh, terminating the call without waiting for a reply, and then shutting his phone off for good.  
He takes a couple of minutes more to get himself together again, throws the butt of his finished cigarette away, slaps softly his cheeks and sighs some more, then when he’s ready he heads back inside, and for once the party noises are such a comfortable sound compared to the silence left hanging in his soul by the conversation just ended. He tries to locate Chris, and when he get surprised by him from behind, his hands pinching not so gently the bottom of his neck, he can’t help but smirking a little as turning to face him.  
« Where the hell did you go? You know you’re not allowed to leave me alone in parties! Other people may get an interest on me, offer me drinks, stuff may happen and so on… »  
« Yeah, you _wish_ … » he giggles and tilts his head, shrugging as to dismiss an annoying thought. « Nothing, I told you it was a conversation I didn’t want to have. But I figured, better deal with it now than let it ruin our evening, don’t you think? » he replies, and then, as feeling more like himself, he smirks slowly towards the other man: « Now, where were we…? »

Chris stays there for a couple of seconds, not entirely sure of what just happened and what exactly those words totally meant. Or just what precisely is that small shadow he can spot trapped in the corner of Robert’s eyes, something that seems so desperate to come out, and yet he knows it won’t be allowed to emerge. Not with him there anyway, not just yet. So he opens up in an honest smile, and decides to allow him a little victory, sensing that he might just need one tonight, for once: « You were gloating as per usual, _Tony_ … »

  
_I'm right here_   
_Five minutes at a time, I'm gone_   
_I can't breathe, I'm in too deep_   
_So take me up to the surface_   
_Take me up to the surface_   


**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to all of you who spent time reading my story. You make my work worth it! xx


End file.
